by
Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed, the 32-year-old former Detroit public health director running for governor in Michigan, who comes from a half-Egyptian household, has challenges beyond being a political neophyte
A Politico headline puts it starkly: "Is Michigan Ready for a Governor Named Abdul?"
The subhead of the story elaborates:" A young candidate’s biggest hurdle will be convincing Trump voters to back an economic progressive with a Muslim surname."
All that being said, El-Sayed's campaign has a strategy it hopes will carry on the spirit and energy of the Bernie Sanders movement, while attracting some Michigan voters who chose Trump in 2016, writes Politico reporter Daniel Strauss:
At 32, El-Sayed has amassed an impressive résumé. He was a three-sport athlete in high school and then played on the lacrosse team at the University of Michigan. He won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, got his medical degree at Columbia and then taught at the university’s Mailman School of Public Health before returning to Detroit to serve as the executive director of the health department for the city of Detroit, the city’s top public health official. But he’s got one big gap on his CV: He has never held elected office. Energetic or not, he knows he has a lot to overcome if he has a prayer of winning the Democratic primary in August 2018.
Strauss shadowed the campaign for a few days, tagging along as El-Sayed knocked on doors, gave stump speeches and strategized privately with his team. Strauss observes that some Detroit suburban voters El-Sayed met seemed skeptical and cautious, but open to hearing what he had to say.
His platform is extremely policy-focused. But El-Sayed emphasizes his background as well, as seen in a speech he gave recently in Spring Lake, Strauss writes:
He told the crowd of 150 about how his father, the eldest of a vegetable salesman and a homemaker' six children, emigrated from Alexandria, Egypt. He describes Thanksgiving at his dad’s, whose wife Jacqueline, El-Sayed's stepmother, comes from a family that has been in Michigan since before the Civil War.
“You’ve got the turkey on the table, you’ve got the Lions losing on TV, and then you’ve got my family,” El-Sayed says, mentioning his grandma Judy, a deacon at her Presbyterian church, and then the “complete wild card,” his Uncle Piotr, a professor of Slavic languages and an avowed atheist. He calls his family “wholly uncommon and highly American.”
“We’re having conversations about all kinds of things. And you can imagine that these people come from fundamentally different walks of life. They have known different histories, but they see a common future,” El-Sayed says.
In response to Strauss, an editor for the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner writes an opinion piece scolding Politico for unnecessarily playing up the racial and religious-based discrimination issues:
If Abdul El-Sayed isn't elected governor of Michigan, it will be because he's modeling his campaign after Bernie Sanders, not because he's named Abdul.
But since Michigan voted (barely) for Donald Trump in the presidential election, Politico has a piece with a headline asking the question, "Is Michigan Ready for a Governor Named Abdul?" A sub-headline expands, "A young candidate's biggest hurdle will be convincing Trump voters to back an economic progressive with a Muslim surname."
The headline-writer could have stopped at "...back an economic progressive."
